Calvert, K.E. (2021) Family and communism in Maria Leitner’s Mädchen mit drei Namen and Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s Lina: Erzählung aus dem Leben eines Dienstmädchens. Journal of European Studies, 51 (2). pp. 111-128. ISSN 0047-2441
Abstract
This article analyses the portrayal of the impact of capitalism on the working-class family and the promotion of the communist movement as a form of surrogate family in Maria Leitner’s Mädchen mit drei Namen (1932) and Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s Lina: Erzählung aus dem Leben eines Dienstmädchens (1924). Reading these two Weimar-era texts as works of Gebrauchsliteratur, which seek to promote communism to a young female readership, I argue that, despite urging greater female participation in the male-dominated sphere of left-wing political action, Leitner and Zur Mühlen rely on normative ideas about gender to advocate political engagement to a demographic assumed to be politically naïve or disinterested. With reference to Weimar-era cultural discourses and strategies of the communist movement, I contest that both novellas are contradictory in their claim to represent a radically progressive political position while simultaneously failing to challenge fundamentally conservative gender norms.
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). | ||||
Keywords: | communist fiction; family; female readership; Gebrauchsliteratur; Maria Leitner; Weimar; Hermynia Zur Mühlen | ||||
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield | ||||
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of Languages and Cultures (Sheffield) | ||||
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Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield | ||||
Date Deposited: | 01 Jul 2021 13:13 | ||||
Last Modified: | 01 Jul 2021 13:13 | ||||
Status: | Published | ||||
Publisher: | SAGE Publications | ||||
Refereed: | Yes | ||||
Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.1177/00472441211010893 |